MUSE

Name: MUSE
Author: Jonathan Galassi
ISBN: 978-0-385-35334-2

by Jonathan Galassi ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015

May be more fun for cognoscenti than for common readers, yet it offers a worthy psalm on the pre-Amazon, pre-digital days of...

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An insider’s look at New York book publishing spins a fable of egos, literature, and commerce in which an editor’s obsession with a poet leads to the revelation of a crucial secret.

Galassi (Left-Handed, 2012, etc.) is a poet and translator and, for his day job, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In this fiction debut, he imagines the gifted and beautiful poet Ida Perkins, cynosure of men literary and otherwise. A critics’ darling from her first collection at 18, she soon captivates enough readers to make her that rarest of phenomena, a profitable poet. Her fortunate publisher is Sterling Wainwright of Impetus Editions, a WASP from old New England money, and his chief rival is Homer Stern of Purcell & Stern, a savvy, foulmouthed Austrian Jew who racks up more Nobels than any other house—except Farrar. The obsessive is Paul Dukach, whose early years working in a bookstore led him to a passion for and near-omniscience about Ida and a job at P&S. A first-time meeting with Ida brings him and the story to the ultimate collision of private person and published writing that has percolated through the novel, as it has through the history of literary criticism. With the Paul and Ida characters, Galassi conveys the thrill of being dazzled by literature. (The sample Ida poems suggest that he favors feeling and clarity over obscurantism.) He also has fun with the language of reviewing while delivering a casual seminar on American poetry. A sense of historical fiction permeates in references to Ida’s many triumphs and contemporary events and in thumbnail sketches of several characters. Janis Joplin sings one of Ida's poems at Woodstock. Marianne Moore tells her “We are pierced by the intricate needlework of your asperitic formulations.” An extended riff on the Frankfurt Book Fair bespeaks years of painful firsthand experience.

May be more fun for cognoscenti than for common readers, yet it offers a worthy psalm on the pre-Amazon, pre-digital days of publishing that anyone might appreciate. Galassi rates praise especially for choosing to have some knowing fun with his years in the business and sparing the world another memoir.

Pub Date: June 2, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-35334-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SCHOOL DAYS
by Jonathan Galassi

- BOOK REVIEW
NORTH STREET
by Jonathan Galassi

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.